the potential of life
I believe when I close my eyes I leave my body
I’m inside wind blown eucalyptus rustling drapers of bark strips
I believe yesterday creates today
because what I saw that night when Redwood Giants Varsity Football
ran onto Brentwood’s lighted heritage stadium
my son became a man
I believe my love of three husbands created
what I understand about hard won dignity
Saturday’s hope forges memories when it was good
most of the bubbles float up to surface and pop
paper narcissus bulbs take root and blossom before New Year’s day
I believe Ginsberg’s Molak sought truthful San Francisco rooftops for his drunken friends
breathing life back from
double-paned windows of that psychiatric building
where his mother, Naomi couldn’t recognize her son
there’s a howl
I believe my chihuahua smiles at me when I tuck him under my arm
once in awhile I’m grateful I can still walk
and my old phone number has a new ring to it
I was young with my second husband and we fished
off St. John’s Island in Alaska’s Gulf
drawing a sixteen horsepower engine through green water
“Never write anything on paper because it can be used against you,” Mom warned me as a child. I was twelve when my sixth grade teacher told me to start writing a journal. She gave us little blue lined notebooks and time to write in them each day. I was prepared to lie about my life. I really wanted to write my truth, however, so I wrote about what was going on at home, booze, loss, blood and heartbreak. My dad was an alcoholic and soon went to a hospital, and his brother committed suicide because he couldn’t stop drinking. We lived in a periodically insane alcoholic world of never knowing when things would explode. I felt mortified every time I thought about Dad’s recent black out and how he drunkenly fell down at the local pool shredding his elbow. I overheard a woman call me ‘the drunk man’s daughter’ and I never wanted to return to the pool or take another breath on this planet.
Home smells like a Sutter’s Gold rose in Mom’s backyard. Even though Mom didn’t water it; the gold glory crimson, orange, yellow grew over eight-feet tall outside of her kitchen window, loaded with full body brilliant perfumed blossoms in Tiburon during spring and summer.
Yipee! My first blueberry picking invitation! Carol and Sandy invited me, and picked me up early in the next morning. We drove up Lily Gap road ten miles to Mills You-Pick Blueberry Farm outside of West Point, California, acres of blueberries, with hundreds of bushes, all types and sizes. Three dollars per pound for you-pick, about half the cost in a store these days. The area is netted over the hundreds of bushes, so birds don’t win the picking game. The sun wasn’t up yet, so it was still cool.
